_We the PeopleBill Fortenberry

Modern accounts of the philosophical underpinnings of the
American Revolution often attribute the concept of popular sovereignty to men
such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau with Locke being
the one most often praised as the source of the American ideal of a government
of the people, by the people and for the people. To make this attribution, however, modern
scholarship has had to ignore or, perhaps, forget the previously held view that
the notion of popular sovereignty can be traced to the government of ancient
Israel as recorded in the pages of the Bible.
As a result, many students of American history are completely unaware of
any link between the doctrines of Scripture and the foundational principles of
American government. This paper is an
attempt to remedy this defect through a review of both the political theory of
the Bible and the recognition of that theory by the philosophers of several
ages leading up to the American Revolution. (Click here to download the entire article as a pdf file.)